One of the major goals of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to unveil the end of the cosmic dark ages and to discover the very first generations of galaxies. With the launch of JWST rapidly approaching, I want to take a step back and review where we currently stand in observationally constraining early galaxy build-up and the end of the dark ages based on existing datasets. Over the last two decades, we have made great progress in extending our cosmic horizon of galaxies with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and we have already pushed into JWST territory with the discovery and spectroscopic confirmation of a galaxy at z=11.1+-0.1, only ~400 Myr after the Big Bang. While the samples of galaxy candidates at z>8 are still small, a significant number of these galaxies are also detected in deep Spitzer/IRAC data, revealing Balmer breaks and enabling estimates of their stellar ages. In this talk I will provide an overview of recent observational progress in the study of the first generations of galaxies with HST+Spitzer, and I will highlight the revolutionary possibilities that are just ahead of us after the launch of the JWST.